TIME FICCC i miss time buckyyy i miss good real thoughtful bipolar representation i miss beautiful scary walls of mystical snow xxx
Time ficccccc xxxxx thank u bestie
In which Bucky is self-medicating with alcohol, waiting for the inevitability of his brain snapping, and leaning in to being the family fuck up because it’s what he thinks he deserves, anyway. I wonder what happens when you take an unmedicated bipolar guy, block access to his crutch/coping method, and chuck him into a scenario that pushes the bounds of sanity.
Kind of a spoiler, but also a moment of Bucky trying to rationalise himself to calm after he and his new tag-along are accosted by Germans:
The beating had been real (Bucky has the smarting aches to prove it) and so had the bullets (blood all over the other American’s fingers), and Bucky has heard of historical war re-enactors but he doesn’t think the middle-aged guys running around Gettysburg actually try to kill each other.
He can’t stop his stare from drifting, from finding the other American’s profile and picking all over him. There’s iron-clad determination in his expression, in the way he’s marching on while injured, and he isn’t sparing Bucky a single glance, which makes deciding whether or not he’s a part of this a whole lot more difficult.
If he’s consensually role-playing a Nazi capture with actual bullets, then maybe for once Bucky isn’t the biggest fuckup in the proverbial room.
If the entire thing is an act and he’s just going along so the freaks behind them don’t do worse than they’ve already done, well. There are two of them now. Two against three, the odds aren’t so bad. Wouldn’t be so bad, if they weren’t both injured.
The only color left in the guy’s face which isn’t a shade of grey is, fascinatingly, the flush of his lips. It isn’t the sort of thing that Bucky should be noticing, but there they are: berry red and delicious, pouting with the way he’s panting his breaths a little, something wholly out of place with the clusterfuck of everything on this day. Staring at him, those pretty lips are weirdly grounding—burst of color in a blizzard of a different kind, drawing Bucky’s focus and giving him a thin shard of clarity.
I also have my long overdue Christmas AU in which Bucky is also hurled into a Situation™ and has to unpack a lot of his feelings about being bipolar and how it connects to his relationships:
Two months into living in London, Bucky had rejected a call from Gale. It had been late, and Bucky had been unable to sleep because this should’ve been the opportunity of a lifetime but nothing he did was good enough, and every mistake was just another reason why he didn’t deserve this, and he didn’t have it in him to pretend to be the guy who Gale was waiting for. A week later, Bucky had his stomach pumped in A&E; his flatmate had been the one to call the paramedics. He never told Gale, but it didn’t matter so much anyway, because only a few days after that, he got kicked out of a pub for trying to start a jousting tournament with the pool cues, called Gale from the adjoining laneway to break up with him, and then did a rail off a freckled redhead’s dick in a club bathroom stall. The lithium prescription had been his birthday gift to himself that year.
Bucky wonders if this version of Gale had been spared any of it. Gale presses the heels of his palms into his eyesockets, inhales through a wet shudder, and the most unselfish decision that Bucky has ever made had been while he was manic.
All my Buckies are bipolar but some are more bipolar than others lmao
(For this WIP ask game plus an obnoxious bonus)
